17/12/09

17/12/09
Nick called me out on it, so I thought I would take the chance to apologize for my rapidly degrading English. I realized now that even the book I am reading is in Portuguese, the only time anymore when I have to think in English is when I write these posts. The rest of the time I am speaking Portuguese with people here, obviously, but also conversations with other PCVs, my inner monologue, and my journal are all in some mixture of English and Portuguese. Today a 17 year old guy who is a student at the technical school across the street told me that he has never been to the hospital. He also told me that his math teacher is Asian, not by using the word Asian, but by telling me he has eyes like this. I was helping organize and sort books in what will be the school’s new library today. In a state of complete disorder was everything from erasers and colored pencils, to coloring books, to lesson books from grades 1-12. I picked up one book called Gin & Tonic for the Soul which is a comic strip in English I have never heard of (think Chicken Soup for the Soul but with a drier sense of humor). I showed my school director who is a sister and explained what gin and tonic was. I said I didn’t know what it was doing here. She shrugs and says “eh, maybe it’s so the children can learn how to drink.” I was helping a man who used to be a teacher at my school but now attends a university in Zimbabwe. I told him that my sitemate is a health worker and he said “yes, the big health problem of Mozambique is malaria” which blew my mind. I pointed out that HIV/AIDS is a huge problem too and he said yes it is but he had seen on the news that the prevalence rates had gone down this year. He then asked if people in the U.S. had HIV/AIDS. During training we had many sessions on the kind of myths we would encounter (that Americans/white people don’t have HIV/AIDS, that all the sick people dying have malaria (many people do die from malaria here, but malaria is also often blamed because HIV/AIDS is rarely admitted and therefore never admitted to have been the cause of a death here)) but I thought that we would encounter these myths in the bush with uneducated people, not in extremely educated people. Yesterday Ann had her first experience of watching a person test positive for HIV/AIDS.